Faith in Starbucks

It's Wednesday afternoon and I'm sitting in Starbucks, my second office, and favorite "thinking place." I spend a lot of time here - working on sermons, catching up on correspondence, writing blogs. But more than anything, I come here and connect. This is where I go to leave my ivory tower and experience life. OK, it's not really an ivory tower, more like a 60's cinder block cube with bad paneling and worn carpet.

But I do come here to connect. This is where the people are. James, Jeremy, Natasha, Alan, Adrianna, and Christina are behind the counter talking about life. People from Fowler stop by my table and say hi. The mayor, Pastor Paul from the Presbyterian Church, Mary who collects cans, Sandie from my church, the UPS guy. People from all walks of life form a human parade, marching to a really bad reggae song playing too loudly through the speakers. In some crazy way these people are my friends. We're fellow members of the human race, loved by God and trying to find our way in life.

This afternoon I asked the partners (the people in the green aprons), "If you could ask God one question, what would it be?" I got a variety of answers, but two stood out. One response was, "Where am I in the universe? The other response was "How am I doing?" I think those two questions capture where most of us are in life. We want to know, we need to know, where we are and how we're doing in life. So we search.

We laugh, succeed, fail, flounder, cry, dance, pretend, grow, struggle. We live. And through it all, we wonder.

My cup is empty. Time for a refill.